Why LA’s tech village is perplexing to penetrate hunger

In today’s day and age, a thought of a “food desert” is unfamiliar to many people — generally in a center of a abounding capital like Los Angeles.

In some of LA’s high-density regions, generally in a south and southeast collection of a city, there are hundreds of thousands of Angelenos who miss entrance to food that is both affordable and healthy. In these communities, a usually accessible options for miles are mostly quick food restaurants or preference stores. When this form of county landscape lacks nutritive living on a systemic scale, it is famous as a food desert.

Food deserts are also mostly underserved by schools, parks, open movement and pursuit opportunities.

Amidst these formidable layers of adversity, formulating a internal food complement with estimable entrance to healthy food is a amicable imperative. For years, organizations like a Los Angeles Food Policy Council and Hunger Action LA have worked to remodel process that increases entrance to healthy food.

This has enclosed a “Good Food Purchasing Program” for schools and a “Market Match” program, that doubles a value of SNAP vouchers during a farmers market. Both of these organizations yield a indication of how to tackle internal food inequity.

More recently, LA’s burgeoning tech zone has been operative to pursue suggestive change and use tech to urge food access.

Hack For LA convenes coders, designers, entrepreneurs, supervision agencies and activists to solve a region’s biggest county challenges. It builds community, domestic will, and software. In that order. Their many new win is Food Oasis LA (FOLA), a mapping height identical to Yelp, that simplifies formidable data, like where to find a nearest food bank, farmers marketplace or village garden.

As a deputy and advocate, we find it both moving and effective to group with county hackers to confront determined amicable deficits head-on. Is record a end-all solution? Absolutely not — though it’s really partial of it. By holding advantage of these 21st century tools, we’re flourishing a some-more estimable landscape that will someday offer everybody in a good city — regardless of their income or zip code.

Andrew Douglas is an areawide executive for a Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council and co-chairs a Los Angeles Food Policy Council Urban Agriculture Working Group.